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Talking with a group last fall, not long after Sweet Chuck was born, a fellow mom said “Long hair is so much more versatile than short hair. You can put it up or leave it down! Everyone cuts their hair short when they have kids, but not me.”

This is a friend of mine, so I knew she just wasn’t realizing that I, who had short hair, was sitting directly beside her. When my presence and shortness of hair occurred to her, she added, “Yours looks great though, Jaime.”

It was then that I thought perhaps I should grow my hair out. But over the past year of enduring my hair’s length, I was reminded of things I’d forgotten:

Wearing a ponytail constantly is not cute. It is the coif equivalent of sweatpants.

A headache recurs around 4pm everyday from wearing hair in said constant ponytail.

Postpartum shedding is about five times worse with long hair.

My wispy hair in the front of my face tickles my nose and gets in my eyes with impunity, even when my hair is in the aforementioned constant ponytail.

I started to get glimpses of myself in shop window reflections or mirrors across the room, and I didn’t like what I saw. And what did I see, exactly? A frumpy, lackluster woman with a baby dribbling off her hip and a preschooler running circles around her legs while the words “no” and “stop that” and “don’t touch that” poured endlessly forth from her lips.

Could I change the dribbling baby, the insane preschooler, or that endless river of negative words? Probably not.